Utilization in IT Services

Clients stopped wanting to buy your hours, and for once that is good news. The catch is that getting paid for the result means owning the cost of every hour you overspend, which only the firm that can see itself can safely do.

Everyone is writing about the firms cutting people. Here is a day at the one that can see itself, where staffing a hard deal is a decision made over coffee, not a weekend lost to it.

Margins are up. Leakage is down. Utilization just hit the lowest point ever recorded, and the gap it opens is, very roughly, the entire profit of a typical services firm.